LL-L "Language maintenance" 2007.03.24 (05) [E]

[Lowlands-L List]

L O W L A N D S - L - 24 March 2007 - Volume 05

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From: Global Moose Translations <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L "Language maintenance" 2007.03.24 (04) [E/S]

Well, I have stayed out of this discussion so far, but this...

Ron:
>I never suggested that any speaker should be forced or feel obligated
>to give up his or her dialect. What I have suggested all along is more
>of a unified way of writing those dialects, because it is mostly the
>divergent spelling "methods" that keep people apart.

What makes you think that it is the spelling, of all things, that would
"keep people apart"? What is that even supposed to mean? I doubt there is
any evidence you can produce to support this. It seems that different
pronunciations, different grammar, different language patterns would keep
different dialects and flavours separate (I assume this is what mean by
"people apart") a whole lot more. LS is still mainly a spoken, not written
language. And if a unified spelling is really needed for some reason, then
the one used by Fritz Reuter (which you call "German based", which seems to
be a bad thing...) will do very nicely.

As to language maintenance... what I have seen here in my home area in the
last two years just hurts too much to describe, really. Old ladies in the
church choir trying to "speak Platt", discussing vocabulary, sounding like
early "le jardin de ma tante" lessons - using some watered-down form of
Eastphalian instead of "real" Sollinger Platt - I wish they would just
forget about it pronto, and let it rest in peace. Young people doing amateur
plays in "Platt" - I had to leave because it was so awful, they all sounded
like second-year foreign language students and barely knew what they were
saying.

Of course, it's still fun to listen to some of the older neighbours suddenly
switching to Platt when they're starting to gossip... but that's just about
it. There is plenty of literature in Lower Saxon, there are plenty of songs
and poems, and it is nice to know that people in some areas still use it in
everyday conversation to this day. But apart from that, please let the dear,
sweet, beloved old language be, and stop trying to drag it kicking and
screaming into the 21st century, corrupting it and stripping it of its
dignity on the way.

And this will be all from me on this topic.

Gabriele Kahn

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language maintenance

Hi, Gabriele!

> What makes you think that it is the spelling, of all things, that would
"keep people apart"? What is that even supposed to mean?

It means what I have said many times before.  On the written level, which is
important in a wider context, spelling differences make it difficult and in
some cases impossible for many people to understand other people, especially
across regional lines with pronounced differences, such as between Northern
and Westphalian, and of course across the border between Germany and the
Netherlands.  We need to bear in mind that most people don't fall into the
linguistically nimble category and are tripped by small differences, even
more so when they are graphic.  Written literature has always acted as the
mortar between the dialectal bricks and as such have given people a sense of
"whole-language-ness."  Where this is absent, such as where there is only
oral literature, fragmentation is particularly strong, especially where
people are sedentary.

Such is the case in Papua-New Guinea for instance (with currently 820
identified languages), as opposed to the Eskimo languages (currently with
three languages: Inuit, Naukan and Yup'ik) with their currently or recently
nomadic speaker populations.  And the latter are a great example of
differences in writing keeping people apart.  Those from Greenland (speaking
Kalaallisut) can converse with those from Northwestern America (speaking
Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun), but they cannot read the Americans' writing,
because a different script is used, which is why international publications
have to feature both scripts. Another example is that of the Dungan of the
area of the former Soviet Union. Their language is Mandarin and is very
closely related to many Mandarin dialects of China, especially those of the
northwestern Hui (as the Muslim Dungan are called in China).  Yet written
communication is at this point in time impossible between them, because the
Dungan of China use the Chinese script and those outside use the Cyrillic
script.  Speakers of Kurmanji Kurdish of Turkey can hold at least
rudimentary conversations with Sorani Kurdish speakers of Iraq and Iran, but
until now they could not share written communication, because the former use
the Roman script and the latter the Arabic alphabet. (This applies to those
living and interacting in Europe as well.)  They have now posted script
converters on the Web as an attempt to bring the two factions together.  So
this is a difference of scripts used as an extreme example.  However, even
if the same script is used written communication can be at least complicated
by great differences in spelling.

> I doubt there is any evidence you can produce to support this.

I know of no official, published study, if that is what you mean, which
doesn't surprise me give that in my experience this is a rather
uncomfortable subject in Germany, especially with regard to the communities
of speakers on the Netherlands side. But this ain't makin' it bogus, is in
itself no debunking ammunition. Personal experience, which you yourself like
to liberally inject into our discussions, are nothing to sneeze at, may
represent observations that indicate tendencies.

Quite a lot of LS speakers have told me that they usually stay away from LS
literature because they find it too tedious to try and read, especially
other dialects, and they don't write it because they don't know the
Rechtschreibung (proper spelling, as though there were any).  Yet some of
the same people attend functions, including authors' readings, and buy
narration CDs featuring speakers from different regions, and they seem to
understand them just fine.  A couple of people I know speak the language
with friends from other areas, but they write to them in German.  Why, this
applies to Dutch too.  Many North Germans can understand spoken Dutch to
some degree or other, but they cannot read it, or they find it too
painstaking to try and decipher it.  The spelling is too strange to them,
because in their heads they pronounce things like z, oe, uu, ui, ij
and euin the German way (
i.e., [ts], [ø:], [u:], [ui], [i:], [oi] respectively).  The differences and
the transition may not seem a big deal to you and me, but it is a big deal
to most people, at least in Germany where a smaller percentage of people is
"linguistically agile."

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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